Oddly enough I always thought that the trade system is too detailed, considering that civilian economy are so simplified. I think that it would have been enough with civilian trade goods as a single commodity which planets may trade with each other. The more civilian trade a planet generate and the more destinations and further away the more they would benefit from it. Trade are usually about being able to purchase stuff you can't otherwise get, rarity is often the key. Civilian trade goods could be anything from services to actual things...

The more a planet would consume its own trade goods the less wealth it would generate and eventually stagnate its economy versus more active planets.

I don't mind how the current system work, but it is somewhat artificial and not particular realistic.

Agreed. Unless there is more actual game mechanics impacts on the trade goods type, I don't think we need more of them, rather less.

Id much rather have 5 trade goods that are better integrated/involved into the game like for example:
- Agricultural trade goods production depending on available space (pop/surface area) and climate of planet, may cause growth penalty if x% of demand not delivered?
- Different shipping lines specialize in different goods gaining bonuses
- Ability to subsidize/ban goods and have it impact flow of trade & traffic
- Dynamic Trade goods consumption depending on type of workers/population are present ( lots of economic center "workers" demand luxury trade goods )

While were on the subject, does anyone ever wish there were more trade goods? I kinda wish there were, and more variety.

Yeah, in an ideal world all things are possible.   But still the powercell isn't going to be made for free.  The sorium has a cost.  The device has a cost.  The reseller must make a profit.  There must be certifications and inspections (on a yearly or more often basis).  Then you have to dispose of the old one.  You need back up power in the advent the thing fails.  Also how big is this thing?  Can you go down to wallmart and get it or does it have to be delievered by truck?  All of this costs money, even if the power is relatively cheap on a per kWh basis.  

Basically entropy always increases, there is no free lunch and perpetual motion machines aren't possible.

I don't see any of those things that can't be made cheaper or more efficient by technology or other products/materials with "magic-like" properties though.

The raw materials in use will be refined and transported cheaper and more effectively.
The device will be able to be built cheaper by more efficient factories.
The faster car/hover-car/plane/truck/trains making the delivery chain will get it further for less meaning less logistics and distribution costs in the lifecyckle per unit.
The size of it will very likely be smaller with more advanced technology (same as above less costs for logistics & handling), very clear real-world example is the minimum cost of a flat-screen compared to a older thicker screen TV/PC-monitor.
If it's to big for fetching with car you likely buy an installation for your house and refill it with fuel, if it's to big for truck you likely buy electricity per kWh from bigger installations like today, whatever is most efficient (whatever is most efficient = cheapest).

When it comes to energy it all depends. If all you need is a single more or less maintenance free house hold power cell that runs on Sorium fuel and last for ten years for the average household, most of the cost associated with energy cost would vanish including the distribution net (more or less). When the powercell is spent you just drive down to Walmart and buy a new one for $1000 which now last for twelve years since it is a more efficient model.
Even industry would run their own power grid for a very low cost.

If you imagine such a world you might get very close to almost limitless cheap energy with very little cost associated with it.

Otherwise I agree, maintaining a large power grid and power plant facilities are very expensive and is a major part of the energy cost even today.

I would agree that if we had more or less unlimited access to extremely cheap energy then poverty as we know it today would most likely be wiped out. But it does not mean there will be economical equality in any way... it might just be the opposite. Even if we could raise the standard of the majority of the worlds poor population to a healthy standard does not mean the gap between those on the bottom and those on top can not widen. You could end up with a sizable part of the population living like billionaires do to day and billionaires of today would have the universe as their playground.

The way I see it Aurora is about resource scarcity and there are not unlimited amount of energy although I would imagine much cheaper than in todays world

No that would not be very useful or user friendly and the player would never see individual buildings anyway.

One value for each building type on each colony or ship component. It would even work the same on a freighter. If you loaded up two mines from two different worlds on a freighter they would combine their tech level, this work equally well for partial load of facilities. This would be for simplicity sake.

Just a point about your spread of technology, this hits a computing issue.  The way it is now you can have the following:
  construction_capacity_planetA = tech_level_multiplier*govenor_effect*call_find_number_of(planetA,construction_factories)

For your suggestion:
 Production_capacity_planetA = govenor_effect*(do N=1,number_of_factories (Temp_prod_cap++ = get_tech_level_mulitplier (tech_level_effect (N,list_of_factories))))

For every race in the game, I need to track what the tech level of the factory is indvidually.  I need to do this for 3 types of factories, and two types of mines, plus refineries, construction ships, asteroid miners, terraformers and refinery ships.

I have substantially increased the database size.  I have substantially increased the complexity of the calculation.  I'm not sure if I have slowed the program down substantially or not.  But I'm making far more calls to the database.

I work with database oriented programing pretty much every day. You only need to add the values for tech level in the same colony table you get number of factories. For ships and components it is just another value in the table. It would not be a substantial increase of the database.

For example... in the DB there is a table called Population which holds all relevant values such as number of facilities, one is ConstructionFactories. The only thing you need is a new value called ConstructioFactoriesTL or some such that tracks its tech level for that population. Then you have tables for ship components and ships which all could add the relevant values you need to keep track on.

It would certainly not make the game run slower in any way. Its the same SQL call just with one extra parameter.

Another thing that often bothered me is how technology seem to inflate resource cost in a way I think seem unrealistic and also how wealth is tied with usage of resources.

I rather think that production lines be them in industry or ships should increase efficiency with time. That way new stuff is more expensive time wise than things you have great experience producing. Then you would decouple wealth expenditure with resource expenditure and make wealth a combination of refining and time. We all heard the phrase "time is money"...
Retooling of shipyards is many times not enough to symbolize this aspect of productivity.

When you for example build a ship it has a cost in resources which should be roughly the same in resources despite technology level but you also spend some resources on the time spent building. Wealth is the same, the difference is that 80% of the resource spending is in the actual item and about 20% on time while 80% of the Wealth is on time and 20% on the actual item. I don't see a huge problem that you need increasing amount of Newtonian material as technology advances, I just don't see the need to tie resources into production capacity in general.

I don't see any particular problem with increasing the industrial production cost of more complex and technologically advanced equipment. It is logical that we need more advanced and efficient industry to produce more advanced equipment. But I see no direct immediate connection of resource use in relation to industrial construction capacity, these could easily be separated numbers. I also don't see why different levels of technology could not require different resources or rather different ratio of those resources. For example different engine technology could each have its own requirement of resources, some could differ vastly in what they need. I do understand that balancing the resources will be more difficult this way so it might not be worth investing time into.

If we take technology enhancement today and compare with historical similarities and the cost of building them you can easily see how the total cost will roughly be equal in relative terms today as in history. The cost is research and development and building up the infrastructure to build stuff and quantity also means things become cheap over time. There are very few mechanics in the game that really reflects this properly.
Taker a modern US infantry soldier and compare that with a medieval heavy infantry soldier. They mostly wear the same amount of equipment and probably cost about the same for society to train and maintain. The difference is in the technology of their respective equipment and the industry required to refine the minerals and materials as well as constructing the equipment. It might be roughly the same man hours in total but very different in quality and lethality in those two soldiers. The amount of resources needed to equip these two are roughly the same, just very different.

I know that Newtonian resources are not the only resources that is used in the production of stuff but the inflationary cost in resources are not really that necessary. Production capacity to build more advanced stuff on the other hand is necessary as is wealth cost since it is tied into time. The most efficient way to reduce cost in Wealth would be to increase production capacity and/or increase efficiency through large quantities of equipment.

The next point would then be no automatic spread of new technology. There could perhaps be a difference between theoretical and practical technology. Each building on a planet has a tech level, or rather you measure it as one value per building type and colony. You can for example have Industry level 1.14. Level one give you 100BP per factory and level 2 give you 120BP and thus level 1.14 give you 103BP per factory. When you move a factory from one planet to the next you recalculate the level based on the level of the factory you just moved, it would be quite simple.
Once you develop new technology you can either give the player the ability to add a project to upgrade or it is done automatically. This will initially cost some wealth, resources and capacity.

There should perhaps also be slightly less linear effects of things and most things should work more like population growths on worlds. We all know that smaller organizations always work more efficient than large ones. It might not be hugely popular to over encourage spreading out industry and research, but it would make sense from a realistic point of view and leaders with bonuses will still make centralization effective in many ways.
This would give smaller empires some advantages over larger ones since they are more efficient and can integrate technology faster into their societies.